Technical Library

If you need electronic assistance to set a temperament—and prefer not to carry a separate dedicated tuner like the Korg OT-120—perhaps you’d rather find a suitable app. All of the tuning apps discussed on this page run on either iPhone or iPad. Cleartune and PitchLab used to be available for Android devices on GooglePlay: Cleartune has recently returned there.

The Apple iTunes store has many tuning apps, but most are for guitars or other simple stringed instruments, so only offer Equal Temperament. Some are next to useless. This page provides the rundown on eight tuning apps for early keyboard: Cleartune, insTuner, iPegs, PitchLab, Sound Tuner, Tunable, VITALtuner™ and Well Tempered. All eight have a varied selection of historic temperaments built in. (Note that the lists of temperaments in the pop-up windows below are exactly named and ordered as they appear in each app, and without detailed external reference provided by the app developers, there may be some doubt of the exact derivation or pitch placement of some of the temperaments on many of these apps. Some temperaments are blatantly incorrect.) The free but now obsolete iPegs app produces tones and has no meter. The paid app Cleartune is well known: It has a chromatic note wheel display with the familiar waving needle and can also generate tones. Most of the glitches in the initial (July 2012) release of the insTuner app were rectified in v2, and the developers engaged me to assist with the necessary refinements in an update. A recent addition to this page is Tunable (September 2017).

These apps were originally tested using iOS9.1 on an iPhone 6S. I am now using an iPhone 7 Plus and iOS12.1.4. Please note that none of these apps are sophisticated enough for tuning a modern piano, although Well Tempered has three forms of Equal Temperament stretch programmed.

The same provisos apply to the use of these tuning apps as to the standalone tuning machines. If you want the best results tuning your early keyboard instrument, set your choice of temperament in a middle octave of the keyboard by aurally matching the tone produced from your app with the acoustic instrument. (If your app has the option, change the usual default sine wave squawk to a waveform with more complicated harmonic structure like sawtooth.) By matching the musical pitch, you are concerned with how things sound rather than having to visually interpret a dancing needle: Music is aural. (If you must use a needle display, look for the option to slow its response speed.) When you have set the temperament in the midrange of the keyboard, turn the device off, and tune up and down in octaves by ear from your temperament octave.

It is helpful to have some knowledge of what you are trying to accomplish in your tuning, especially if you are accompanying other instrumentalists. Rather than just mindlessly selecting your desired temperament and hoping that it will somehow transfer itself successfully to the keyboard, you’ll do a far better tuning if you can understand the temperament’s structure. For example, a lot of musicians use Vallotti, but how many know that it has half of its fifths tuned perfectly, and the other half tempered exactly twice as much as Equal Temperament? The Circle of Fifths schematic and the tuning directions for many popular temperaments can be found in the Temperaments section of the Technical Library, commencing with the Pythagorean Spiral.

Happy tuning!

Carey’s tuning app feature wish list…

Simple but intelligent display

Status bar remains visible

No gaudy colors

Use of real typographical sharp (♯) and flat (♭) instead of hash (#) and letter (b).

Reasonable number of popular pre-programmed temperaments (maximum 30 or 40?)

Data available on developer website for source of each temperament and links to further information

“Werckmeister III” is not the usually expected temperament, but actually Werckmeister V.

When iPhone set to silent and sleeping, running app will squawk when phone wakes with incoming text or call even if app “Mute” button was selected.

Note:

This early-developed app does not work on iPhone 6S and has been withdrawn from the iTunes store. iPegs v2 has been undergoing Beta testing and was expected for release April 2016 but has yet to appear.

This app appears to be now only working correctly if installed on earlier devices. Although still available on the iTunes Store, the developer has not responded to requests for an update to properly allow microphone access on the latest devices.